Looming health crisis will haunt Gaza long after the killing stops
THE eight-year-old boy’s question seemed simple enough but was all the more tragically poignant for that.
“Why don’t you have the lights on?” Mohammed Badran asked on waking up from reconstructive surgery carried out after an Israeli shell struck the house where he slept and blew away most of his face.
“I couldn’t explain it. I said it’s just because you are recovering from surgery that we have the lights off,” said Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British plastic surgeon who conducted the emergency procedure at Gaza City’s Shifa hospital.
Mohammed’s life will be forever in darkness. He lost one eye and was totally blinded in the other in the July 30 strike on his home in the southern Gaza town of Nuseirat. His 10-year-old sister, Hanan, and his brother, Ebrahim, 12, were also seriously injured.
The boy’s family is appealing for urgent action to transfer him to a British hospital capable of carrying out sophisticated surgery that is beyond the capacity of Gaza’s drastically overstretched and impoverished facilities.
Help may be at hand in the form of 15 National Health Service doctors and nurses being sent to Gaza.
The team includes specialist physicians on the British government’s International Emergency Trauma Register. The team’s arrival was supposed to coincide with an expected end to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has so far killed around 1,900 Palestinian — most of them civilians — and 67 Israelis, nearly all of them soldiers.
But hostilities continued yesterday, a day after a 72- hour ceasefire expired without an agreement to extend it. Five Palestinians were reported dead after at least 30 Israeli air strikes over Gaza while militants were reported to have fired at least six rockets into Israeli territory.
Meanwhile, Mohammed — who also suffered acute abdominal injuries that produce an alarming rattling sound when he breathes — is just one of many Palestinians in Gaza needing urgent treatment abroad for wounds suffered during Israel’s month-long bombardment of the tiny coastal territory.
In contrast to past conflicts, only a tiny number of such cases have been transported outside Gaza for surgery — a situation exacerbated by the closure of the Erez border crossing with Israel and Egypt’s refusal to ease restrictions on its frontier at Rafah.
“Ten to 15 patients are being processed from Gaza every day through Rafah when the World Health Organisation was expecting 50,” said Fikr Shaltoot, programme director of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAPS) . “The total number of patients sent through Rafah from the beginning of the conflict until August was 160. This is a very small number when you are talking about 10,000 injuries.”
The result is a looming health catastrophe which professionals say will haunt Gaza for decades to come.
The territory’s health services have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of acute and traumatic injuries that have included limb amputations, severe burns, open fractures that have left bones exposed after tissue had been torn away, and facial trauma.
At Shifa — where scores of displaced families have slept in the hospital courtyard, creating public health worries — countless numbers of maimed patients have not been discharged simply because their homes were destroyed in Israeli strikes. Doctors balk at sending people with open wounds on to the streets or to overcrowded makeshift UN shelters, where they cannot be observed as outpatients.
It has resulted in severe over-crowding. Doctors fear such condit ions will lead to cross-contamination of wounds, which are sometimes inadequately dressed because of a shortage of basic medical supplies. The huge volume of emergency operations has put intolerable strain on equipment, as well as staff, with vital medical implements breaking during surgery due to excess use.
Meanwhile, doctors and nurses have come close to buckling. After the multiple shelling of Gaza City’s Shejaiya market during a supposed humanitarian ceasefire on July 30, about 200 patients were admitted to Shifa within four minutes - leading to pandemonium as doctors treated the injured in corridors.